Verizon Under My Skin

by Bryon D Beilman

Verizon is now on strike and although I have paid attention to various strikes, NFL lockout, NBA Players or the UAW,this one has an impact on me, my customers and for some reason has really gotten under my skin. I will say that I am not fully educated on both sides of the strike. I read what Verizon says on their website http://newscenter.verizon.com/2011-bargaining/ or an article from another site http://www.golocalprov.com/business/new-verizon-strike-nears-two-week-mark/. This basically says , Verizon is trying to cut costs, ask people to contribute to their benefits and try to remain competitive and the union is saying, WTF, the CEO makes more than 1000 times the average employee and Verizon paid 10 Billion to shareholders this year.

I am not going to argue that CEO pay for big companies is not out of whack, it is. If shareholders got paid, then I would suggest that those dedicated workers of Verizon invest in their own company, buy some stock and "get paid too". As a business owner, I find that health care costs are going up and we are constantly working to try an provide the best health care for the best prices for our employees. One of the above articles says that most Verizon Union members pay nothing for their health care premiums. I haven't been at a company in 15 years that has provided 100% premiums, actually ever, but I say 15 years, because I cannot be certain. This, however, doesn't bother me that much, because what really bothers me is the following:

Customer A

One of my customers, Customer A, had been planning to move to a brand new location, and we worked with them to migrate their IT infrastructure and services to the new location. We had redundant Internet connections, but the phone service along with a fail-over DSL line was coming from Verizon. The week of the move, Verizon emails and says, "Sorry, we cannot help you due to the strike". It doesn't matter that the lease is up, and the phone numbers are linked to Verizon. It also doesn't matter that the disconnect order is automated, and the reconnect order is a manual "union labor position" operation. So, they automatically disconnected the service and left their customer without ANY phone service.

What those passionately striking people do not realize is that this is the type of thing that spurns innovation and migration away from them so that Verizon services along with their jobs will soon not be needed. In the interim, we gave our customer a few of our IP phones, connected them to our VoIP/SIP server and service and gave them phone service over the primary non Verizon Internet connection. The CEO loved our flexibility and is so enamored with the service and Idea that we are working to perhaps migrate them fully to VoIP service.

Do you hear that Verizon workers? If you give bad service and do not offer a good value for the price, people will find a way to use someone else.

Customer B

Customer B is a much larger company and they use the Verizon Data Center in Billerica, MA by utilizing two 100MB Pipes and 10 racks for servers along with managed firewall and IDS/IPS services. I do not know what they pay, but based on simple math of $1000/rack/month *10 plus Internet & Managed services, I would guess that is somewhere around $250k/year of regular revenue from that one customer.

We go to the data center weekly to just walk through, swap bad power supplies, disks or whatever needs to be done. The Verizon strikers, those crafty guys are picketing in front of the security gate at this site. They walk in front of my car a few times, the cops direct me to wait for a bit, then go. While I was waiting, I attempted to take a picture with my cell phone, which unfortunately got blurred, then one of the strikers flipped me the bird and said "take a picture of that". I have to roll down my window to give my credentials to the security team over a microphone to open the gate. The stikers are looking at me and I am nodding at them, and one striker is yelling at me saying "don’t nod at me you scab" and then gives me the bird again.

OK, that was interesting, the Verizon strikers are now insulting their customers. Doing a Google search, I quickly found 18 data centers in the Boston area Data Center Map . Again, without knowing the full issues that are going on about the strike, do the strikers really want this customer to take their $250K/yr and give it to Savvis, NEDS, XO or somewhere else?

This is bad business for Verizon and to be honest, as an IT consulting company who is paid to provide sound advice to their customers, I am not sure that recommending Verizon would be sound advice.